China has a long history of exerting tight control on the speech of it’s citizens and on what sites they can access from behind The Great Firewall of China. (Last I heard, easyDNS was blocked there for years because we are a dynamic DNS provider; which enables Chinese dissidents to setup non-sanctioned web servers on dynamic IPs to thwart The Wall). Many citizens use VPN providers in order to circumvent government blocking, which is now harder to do. VPN providers have begun reporting that their Chinese customers can no longer access their services while at least one Chinese-based VPN has been ordered to shutdown by the government.

Usually when I sit down to write this I have an easy “item in the bag” just by typing a quick paragraph about whatever new ransomware worm outbreak that is based on leaked NSA hacking tools. But nothing like that happened since Petya aside from the usual smattering of derivations and knock-offs. What gives? Well at least NSA whistleblower, Bill Binney, issued an affidavit on July 4th stating that the NSA is still illegally vacuuming the data of American citizens. Keep the faith.

In what could be described as a “Come-to-Jesus” talk delivered by Craig Wright (the self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto), the Bitcoin community is even more abuzz now over the looming decision whether to adopt Segregated Witness (“Segwit”) to solve the Bitcoin scaling problem (among other things). Wright vehemently opposes Segwit, while Bitcoin core is in favour. When I first heard about this I didn’t even understand what “Segregated witness” means. I do now, thanks to two podcasts via the Let’s Talk Bitcoin podcast network:

On Let’s Talk Bitcoin #337 Adam Levine and Andreas Antonopolis discuss the issue with Andreas sounding rational and more on the “in favour of SegWit” side.

From my relatively uninformed-on-the-deep-guts-of-the-code viewpoint, this sounds a lot like the “systemd will destroy linux” hysteria when that was supposed to cause the collapse of civilization as we know it.